Communication trends in company reports

The excellent cartoon presentation on the opposite page is an example of a company communicating with its employees. In the UK, formal company reports to employees are a recent innovation, say four or five years old and they are still not all that common. The message is a good one: our company has paid the community £3m in tax from which all these good things could be bought; we are a good neighbour and we fulfil our community obligations responsibly. No company has yet gone so far as to comment that it would take the tax from 34 companies like this to pay for the debts of British Steel in 1978.